


My Pieces Won't Fix

by Fenix21



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Linden asked and so she received, M/M, Post-Episode: s12e02 Mamma Mia, episode coda, implied wincest, just another quiet moment that really goes nowhere, while the boys hash out their own emotional mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-25
Updated: 2016-10-25
Packaged: 2018-08-24 14:16:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8375374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fenix21/pseuds/Fenix21
Summary: Dean finds Sam alone with his thoughts and the ceiling fan.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I could probably go on with these codas forever, so watch out. Linden mentioned that the season premier episode of TWD was just a little too much and should be remedied by yet more brother cuddles, so. Here you go!

Dean had given himself three beers and thirty minutes to marinate in his own emotional stew before he pried himself off the kitchen floor and went in search of Sam.

The kid had been a bundle of nerves since Cas had healed enough of his injuries to get the pain off the forefront of his mind and let the realization that the mother he’d never really known was standing in front of him. He’d gyrated between complete silence and babbling (worse even than when he’d met Chuck the first time) on the drive home, and once he’d gotten cleaned up, it had taken Dean five minutes to coax him from his room and down the hall where Mary had spread their take-out fried chicken dinner on actual plates (true, they were paper, but still) with actual silverware rummaged from the kitchen drawers. They had eaten in a companionable, if not comfortable silence. Sam always seeming on the edge of saying something but then thinking better of it until Mary finally pinned him down, and even then he let himself be distracted by Dean and his pie because it was easier than looking at her.  

After Dean had decimated the pie and offered to clean up, Mary had disappeared to her room, and Sam had puttered uncertainly in the kitchen for twenty minutes before he, too, vanished. It wasn’t hard to guess where he’d gone. Dean knew he was itching for a connection while at the same time terrified of facing Mary with the dark and tainted baggage of his past. He’d intended to field that first meeting, to mediate it just to be sure Sam didn’t go too far down his own dark rabbit hole and end up in a tailspin of self-blame and guilt, but he didn’t want to hawk over him either. The kid had done an admirable job in last few years of, if not letting go of his guilt, at least not letting it get the better of him. He could handle this on his own, and if he couldn’t, well, Dean was willing to work cleanup duty. He had often enough in the past. 

The bottles at his feet teetered and clinked together as he stumbled slightly, exhausted to his bones, more from the emotional strain of the last few days than anything else. He’d refused to let Cas work him over, telling him to use his juice on Sam who was in a lot worse shape, so his ribs and jaw were still a little sore from that British bitch’s sigil-beefed brass knuckles, but it was nothing he wouldn’t heal from in a day or three. He bent to retrieve the bottles and the stack of photographs he’d been shuffling around, lingering for a moment on the one of Mary and Sam and himself when Sam was only a few days old. He cursed softly, turned it over, and banded the stack together, stuffing them in his back jeans pocket. 

He found Sam in his room, lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling fan. 

‘Hey, kiddo,’ he said softly, leaning into the door frame and knocking lightly with one knuckle. 

Sam blinked slowly but didn’t turn his head or say anything.

‘You doin’ okay?’ Dean asked, coming into the room.

Sam pulled in a deep breath and it shuddered out of him on the exhale. ‘No.’ His eyes flicked to Dean’s for just a second then back to the ceiling. ‘Not really.’

Dean settled on the edge of the bed beside Sam’s hip, turned slightly, and he could see then the dried trails of tears from the corners of Sam’s eyes. He frowned. ‘Did she—?’

‘No. No, she was great,’ Sam said quickly. ‘Great. She was…great. I just. Dean, I don’t know if…’

‘Hey. Hey, hey,’ Dean gripped Sam’s thigh and squeezed lightly. The kid’s eyes were already starting to well up again. ‘It’s okay, Sammy. It’s okay.’

He wasn’t sure what he was promising was going to be okay, wasn’t even sure if he could make it so, but for now he needed Sam to rest. Cas may have healed his body, but his mind was another matter. Dean knew from experience the exhaustion that followed trying not to break under the hands of a master torturer, and while Lady Toni Bevell may not have been an expert, she was cruel and concise in her own way. Until Sam dealt with all she’d done to him, he wasn’t going to be completely healed.

Sam’s chest was laboring under a retrained sob, and Dean reached up to spread a hand over his hard-beating heart. ‘She’ll be here in the morning, Sam. You’ve got time. We all have time now. You need to rest.’

Sam nodded, sucking his bottom lip between his teeth and biting down. He dropped one hand from behind his head to lay over Dean’s and pressed down. ‘I-I know.’

‘I know you do.’ Dean leaned forward and wiped away another escaped tear with the pad of his thumb. ‘And I know it’s a lot to take in. Hell, it’s a lot for me, too, and I knew her…thought I knew her.’

Sam’s eyes cut to Dean’s face. ‘Dean.’

Dean shrugged away Sam's sudden concern because this wasn't about him. He didn't want to face his own ghosts right now. He'd put them away with the three beers and the photos still in his back pocket. 'Don't worry about it, Sammy.'

Sam wasn't nearly mollified, but he laid back, turned his eyes back to the ceiling fan, let out a long, slow breath. 'I told her… I told her she filled in the biggest blank.' 

His gaze cut to the side gain, gauging Dean's reaction, looking for something maybe, but Dean kept his expression carefully neutral. He may have virtually raised the kid, been both father and mother to him for all intents and purposes, but that didn't mean he'd actually filled the roll or took the place of the woman in the opposite hallway. 

Sam slotted their fingers together across his chest and squeezed. 'I wanted it to be true,' he said in a very small voice. 'Like magic. I wanted her to just feel…right.'

Dean waited out the following silence, watched another tear slip across Sam's temple down to the pillow beneath his head, and finally said, 'But it didn't.'

Sam swallowed, gave a shake of his head, and shut his eyes against more tears. 'It felt good, but…' He swallowed again, forced his eyes back open wide to stare above him into some far gone spatial memory only he could see. 'I'm broken, Dean. I'm broken, and nothing— _nothing—_ can fix me.'

'Oh, Jesus, Sammy…' Dean twisted around and blanketed Sam's torso, felt the rattling sob against his belly where it pressed against Sam's as his little brother's whole body drew tight with it and he reached around Dean and clung to him hard, fingers clawing into the flannel of his shirt and fisting there, pulling Dean down and down until Sam could bury his face in the curve of his neck and let the anguish out in a hot, choked rush of air. 

'I thought— I thought—' he choked on his words, strangling himself on half-sobbed breaths. 'I thought it would…all be okay. Thought I'd be…fixed. Whole. But…'

Dean slid his arms under Sam's shoulders, pulled him up against his chest, cradled him, tucked him up close beneath his chin. He shut his eyes and pressed his cheek to the top of Sam's head. Comfort for both of them. 

'Sammy, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.'

It tore at his heart to hear the stuttered confession, to learn the broken pieces of pain Sam still carried around inside himself that he had believed—like any child would at the reappearance of a lost parent—Mary's mere presence could mend. Dean didn't know if he wasn't as naive or simply too jaded, but he'd had no illusions on seeing her that anything about himself would change. He _was_ broken, down deep, in ways that he doubted even God could fix, but it was okay. He had made himself into what he was, all his own choices had worked to fashion him into this, and he had accepted it.

Sam, though, had been brutally forged into his shape. Tainted, twisted, and beaten by the agents of Hell. Molded by Lucifer himself. He believed he was unclean and wanted more than anything to be purified. The evidence of the tattered remnants of Sam's innocence were perhaps what sliced the deepest in Dean's gut, making him bleed inside for want of being able to somehow make it all right. 

He held Sam tight while he cried, knew there was more there than tears for Mary. This was a cleansing as much as an outlet of grief, washing him clean of the fear and fury of his captivity and cruelty at the hands of that woman.

He quieted eventually, going slack in Dean's arm so that he thought Sam had fallen asleep, but when Dean leaned to rest him back against the pillows, Sam's eyes fluttered open.

'Stay?'

Dean settled him back on the pillows and raised up to move down the bed and undo the laces of his boots and tug them off. 'Of course, Sammy.'

He closed the door, threw the lock as an afterthought, no sense in overwhelming Mary any more than they had already, turned off the lights, and made his way back to the bed, sliding down beside Sam and stretching out. As soon as he settled, Sam's weight was up against his side, creeping a bent leg between his knees and a foot between his ankles, a hand crept across his chest, fingers kneading deep into the muscle, testing for the heartbeat underneath, and soft breath chuffed across his throat where Sam had pillowed his head on Dean's shoulder and was now breathing easy toward sleep.

Dean stroked through Sam's hair, down the curve of his shoulder and the line of his back, felt Sam sigh against him and his muscles go loose and languid, the weight of him pressing closer and warmer into Dean's side. Dean turned his head to brush a kiss over his little brother's temple.

'It's gonna be okay, Sam. I'm gonna make sure of it,' he whispered.

'I know,' Sam murmured after a long stretch of silence, more asleep than awake. 'You always do.'


End file.
